The EarthBox Project in Grayson County, Virginia

Abstract

First paragraph:

In 2014, Kathy was contacted by Michelle Stamper, coordinator of the local Feeding America mobile pantry program in western Grayson County, Virginia. This pantry serves clients one Monday evening a month at a local school. Feeding America Southwest Virginia sends a truckload of food from Abingdon, Virginia, and volunteers assemble food boxes that are then placed directly in clients’ vehicles. Michelle had considered why the food pantry was needed, when rural Grayson County has such a rich agricultural history. When she reached out to Kathy, she asked if the nonprofit Kathy leads, Grayson LandCare, could help her teach pantry clients how to grow some of their own food. She said that many of them grew up with gardening, perhaps at their grandparents’ home, but very few gardened cur­rently and some may not even have known how to grow vegetables on their own. . . .

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Center for Regional Food Studies at the University of Arizona

The mission of the Center for Regional Food Studies at the University of Arizona is to integrate social, behavioral, and life sciences into interdisciplinary studies and community dialogue regarding change in regional food systems. We involve students and faculty in the design, implementation, and evaluation of pilot interventions and participatory community-based research in the Arizona-Sonora borderlands foodshed surrounding Tucson, a UNESCO-designated City of Gastronomy, in a manner that can be replicated, scaled up, and applied to other regions globally.

2019 Shareholder Commentary:Cultivating a Network of Citizen-Scientists to Track Change in the Sonora-Arizona Foodshed (forthcoming)

Example of Programming:

Reimagining Community Cultural Identity, Monday, April 1, 2019

Public Lecture by Carlton Turner, Lead Artist/Director of Mississippi Center for Cultural Production (Sipp Culture)

In this talk, Carlton Turner will use the work of Sipp Culture as a framework for how rural communities are grappling with reimagining their cultural identity in the wake of systems consolidation (in educational, medical, and food systems) and expansion of the digital divide across race and class lines.

Carlton Turner works across the country as a performing artist, arts advocate, policy shaper, lecturer, consultant, and facilitator. He is the founder of the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production (Sipp Culture), which uses arts and agriculture to support rural community, cultural, and economic development in his hometown of Utica, Mississippi.

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Why are we a shareholder of JAFSCD? It’s simple. The Center for Environmental Farming Systems and NC State Extension share the same goals as JAFSCD in promoting research-based strategies that simultaneously minimize food insecurity and farm loss and maximize community resilience.

—Dr. Nancy Creamer, Director, Center for Environmental Farming Systems, North Carolina State University

The Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development is published by the Thomas A. Lyson Center for Civic Agriculture and Food Systems, a project of the Center for Transformative Action (a nonprofit affiliate of Cornell University). JAFSCD is published with the support of these shareholding partners: